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Well I have been working with Android for a few weeks now and I am absolutely loving it. Here are a few little tips I have discovered along the way to make life easier.

• Do not fight with Android. Everybody knows that robots are bigger and stronger than flesh and blood. If you find yourself fighting against the system you are doing something wrong.
• Do not hard code strings - use the strings.xml resource and come up with a naming convention that works for you. There is no

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I was surprised to notice that there wasn't a single tutorial on this forum which covered the creation of your own Exception classes, so I decided to make a small tutorial for you.
TL;DR - If you don't fancy reading all the details, you may jump straight to the code, as it's pretty self explanatory if you have a basic concept of Exceptions and their hierarchy.

Introduction

You might be surprised to know that creating your own Exception is as easy, if not easier ...

Adding sound and music to your app is extremely easy. Place your sound file in a new directory res/raw.

import android.media.MediaPlayer;

and then where you want the music to play:

MediaPlayer myMusic = MediaPlayer.create(this, R.raw.splashsound);
myMusic.start();

where splashsound is the sound file's name without the extension.

That's it!

Well I have had a frustrating few hours working out how to add buttons dynamically. Here is how I did it. Firstly, you need to give the layout an ID in the xml file.

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/buttonlayout"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical" >

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Introductions
Hi! My name is Chris and I love to program. This is the first of what I hope will be many blog entries on Android development. At times, the content may appear scattered like I have A.D.D. or something. That is because I will be adding things as I work; links, snippets, etc (who am I kidding, I just smoke too much pot). This is not a tutorial, I will not hold your hand and lead you towards enlightenment. Think of this more like breadcrumbs I leave along the path to becoming ...